Coursework on Teams/OneDrive

[karenf]

I'm new to my current role in a Microsoft school. In previous schools I have worked in they have set coursework as assignments via google classroom so I assumed they would be set in a similar way via Teams here. This is the case in most departments, but not all. I've recently had issues with students Sharing coursework to teachers as links to OneDrive documents but then moving/renaming/deleting those documents. In several instances the work has been lost and is unrecoverable as the loss wasn't noticed until after the 30 day retention period. Can I just check - if the assignment was set by the teacher in teams would this eliminate the risk of lost coursework or would teachers have to keep checking that the student hadn't deleted their assignment.

Alternatively, is there a better Microsoft method for setting and collecting in coursework.

Thanks

[PotNoodleTech]

The google for education offering is approx 1 light year ahead of the microsoft offering - I don't know why but for the last 10+ years MS have spectacularly failed at building a simple easy to use classroom system. (And they've had plenty of goes!)

 

The fact is sharepoint teams etc is all difficult to use for an end user. We still see loads of (adult) people in the LA struggling with teams and sharepoint on a daily basis and yet my pupils with a reading age of 6 are using google classroom day in day out zero problems.

 

You will get people on here saying I am wrong and microsoft are great but sadly I just think they've never been lucky enough to witness how smooth a google school runs.

[karenf]

The school was Google over lockdown but the Trust moved to Microsoft coming out of lockdown with a large part of the issue being that no staff were given training they were just expected to move over to Microsoft. I agree that while they could use google with no training over lockdown, Microsoft Teams appears to have several ways to do the same thing and policies should have been decided and training offered. Some departments are using it really well (predictably IT, maths, science etc) whilst others seem to be continually losing documents etc.

Going to work with teaching staff so we can move forward, particularly with coursework so if anyone in a Microsoft school can tell me how they do it it would be greatly appreciated.

[Rob_D]

For us, using the Teams assignment works fine. Kids upload their completed work using the Teams assignment interface so the work is saved on the team and only the teacher and that student have access. The work is safe from accidental deletion or modification (or as safe as it can be), and is accessible for as long as you keep the team active.

 

In progress work would still be saved to OneDrive, but that would be the same however you did it.

 

Out of interest how would you do this in a google environment?

[karenf]

It's the same in google. You set an assignment in google classroom and the assignment is saved in the classroom drive rather than the students google drive. If students saved the coursework in their personal google drive the teacher wouldn't be able to access to check progress and there would be risk of deletion. Just wanted to check a Teams assignment worked in the same way to a google assignment.

Unfortunately, again probably due to lack of training or processes, staff don't really understand the difference between OneDrive, SharePoint, teams etc. We have entire schemes of work shared out to staff via links to an individuals OneDrive with no thought as to what happens when that person leaves. Also staff often share a document via a share link then delete the document thinking they don't need it anymore now they have shared it.

Is your school set up with SharePoints for shared resources and users only using their OneDrive for personal documents or perhaps something they are working on and not ready to share?

[SimplyJade]

It's the same in google. You set an assignment in google classroom and the assignment is saved in the classroom drive rather than the students google drive. If students saved the coursework in their personal google drive the teacher wouldn't be able to access to check progress and there would be risk of deletion. Just wanted to check a Teams assignment worked in the same way to a google assignment.

Unfortunately, again probably due to lack of training or processes, staff don't really understand the difference between OneDrive, SharePoint, teams etc. We have entire schemes of work shared out to staff via links to an individuals OneDrive with no thought as to what happens when that person leaves. Also staff often share a document via a share link then delete the document thinking they don't need it anymore now they have shared it.

Is your school set up with SharePoints for shared resources and users only using their OneDrive for personal documents or perhaps something they are working on and not ready to share?

 

Hi Karen, forgive me for asking but would it not be worth asking SLT to have some training on this at all? If you're new to the role and a little unfamiliar with processes (if there are any) surely this is something you could request?

[Rob_D]

Yeah. We've got a "All Staff Shared" SharePoint/Team for all whole school stuff, Department/Curriculum Area SharePoint sites/Teams for department shared work and teaching resources, and OneDrive for personal stuff like CPD/Appraisal.

 

Training wise, we started from a point of "SharePoint=Old Shared Area" and "OneDrive=Old Home Drives" but in the cloud, referencing back to things they already know like an on-site shared drive helps (the phrase "like the old shared area" appear a lot in our training docs). The below graphic helped staff get their heads around the idea that Teams Files tab and SharePoint are the same place.

[karenf]

Do you know if on a teams assignment you can attach a new document to the assignment for each student (like you can in google classroom) - so for instance they all have a word document assigned to them.

 

UPDATE - sorry I've just tried it and of course you can and it's fairly self explanatory. Not sure why we have the difficulty moving from google to microsoft then - will have to investigate more

Edited April 18, 2024 by karenf

[psydii]

Love that diagram, did you make that in house? If so what tools did you use? I'd love to see/make a tweaked versions to cover the Assignments Module/Student Work Doc libraries

[NegativeKillDeath]

A couple of stumbling blocks my teachers had with MS Teams assignments. Students added to a team after an assignment has be set but before the due date won't necessarily see the assignment. There is a tick box when setting the assignment to control this behaviour. Similarly if a student move from a class/team that has an outstanding assignment it will remain visible to the student until the due date. We had some teachers be clever and set up all the assignments at the beginning of the term but set the due date for the end of term. It triggered a lot of the situations mentioned above.

[Rob_D]

Love that diagram, did you make that in house? If so what tools did you use? I'd love to see/make a tweaked versions to cover the Assignments Module/Student Work Doc libraries

We made it ourselves using LucidChart (free account).

 

https://lucid.app/lucidchart/5ce448f9-341a-4f91-9d54-0351a9487267/edit?invitationId=inv_7d4879d9-88a3-449b-87e2-d7254ea5ccff

If you go File>Duplicate, you can make your own editable copy.

[karenf]

Also wondering for subjects like Media where students coursework is several large files how do you set it up so that teachers can see the coursework progressing etc? At the moment students work on the files in their OneDrive then every so often upload to a shared folder on a SharePoint (but this folder is shared to all students in the class so they could delete others work). Is there a better way for teachers to have oversight?

Thanks so much for all the help

[karenf]

So what is best practice when setting up assignments? I would have imagined this was a good ideo to set everything up at the beginning but due to the issues mentioned I can see why it isn't

[psydii]

For us, Assignments are created by teachers as they need them.

 

We don't use Teams to performance manage the teacher's compliance with homework policy.

 

Some departments create assignments each week (for homework), others create per term (for coursework), others just create one per academic year and then use the underlying folders ignoring the Assignments UI completely.

 

We use a separate system designed for parental engagement for the official setting of homework. If its not on that system, then it hasn't been set. Often though the homework on that system says "Complete Assignment X in Teams". Again this is done lesson by lesson, week by week, not all at once in advance.

[karenf]

What do you mean by this

"others just create one per academic year and then use the underlying folders ignoring the Assignments UI completely."

Could this be a solution for our media students? When an assignment is created and the student folders are created in student work can these be used to share further documents with the teacher?

[psydii]

The Assignment App creates a "Student Work" Document Library.

 

Inside this document library it creates two folders "Working Files" and "Submitted Files"

 

Inside these folders there is one folder per student member (as per Team membership t the time the last assignment was set)

 

Inside each student folder there is a folder with the name of every assignment set so far.

 

Students can work in the appropriate assignment folder in the "Working Files" folder and the teacher can view these files directly through SharePoint (or OneDrive/SharePoint Sync) Students cannot view each other's work.

 

It is necessary for the Teacher to show the students how to get to their Working Files folders through SharePoint and how to use OneDrive to Sync them. Smart students will often "add this folder to my OneDrive" so that they can subsequently access it easily without having to worry about navigating the SharePoint Site(s) in future. This also means their course /assignments folders are sync'd automatically by OneDrive, again making it simpler to setup and move between machines. Because I think about how this scales, our official guidance is that they should opt to sync their Working Files folder on each machine on which they need it, rather than the onedrive-shortcut trick. This way they don't end up with their onedrive full of links to course folders. I am uncertain whether my method or the students' method is the best in the long term.

 

On the use for Media etc. The most recent guidance I have seen still suggests that using a sync folder for Premier / Logic / Final Cut project files is not a good idea (it used to ensure data loss, but I haven't tested to see if its got any better in the last five years). The departments that use these products have their own workflows for ensuring students don't loose work. They have recently begun to ensure students primarily use the sync'd Working Files folders for storing their assets. How they manage their project files is a bit of a mystery, but I think they just copy to a OneDrive/SharePoint folder each lesson.

 

Working Files vs Submitted Files.

The Assignment app moves work between the "Working Files" folder and the "Submitted Files" folder when work is "handed in". This is why for courses that want to make use of shared folders for their course work we recommend a single assignment at the beginning of the year and then to leave the Assignment App well alone after that. Departments with a significant degree of competency in their staffing and students might also set more traditional assignments as well, because they are able to trust their staff/students to save their ongoing coursework in the folder structure, and use the assignment app for the week-by-week coursework reports.

[karenf]

Thanks so much psydii that is so clear and so helpful

[tjbland]

Great ideas here, thanks for sharing! We are going to be moving towards Teams/Onedrive for future classroom activities...

[Frodo_Baggins]

Any "gotchas" or useful software that anyone has found? I see MATS moving to Teams but not much discussion.

We'll be moving to Teams assignments from Satchel and just sorting out the parentapp (already use Salamander\Clouddesignbox with SDS)

[psydii]

Thanks, that’s very detailed. So if a student shares a file with teacher via sharepoint, the work won’t be lost even if the student deletes the file?

 

If using the Assignments App within the Team (rather than accessing the folder structure directly), yes submitted work it safe from accidental deletion by the student.

 

If you are using the Working Files folders directly, the usual protections for SharePoint apply: 90 days after it is deleted by a user, it is irrevocably gone forever.

 

You might consider retention policies if the work is very important.